Reporting on quake damage in L’Aquila, in central Italy, the New York Times’ traveling art critic, Michael Kimmelman, steps out of the story to comment on why he’d rather live out of suitcases on the road than be part of the contemporary art world he once knew:
Italy is not like America. Art isn’t reduced here to a litany of obscene auction prices or lamentations over the bursting bubble of shameless excess. It’s a matter of daily life, linking home and history. Italians don’t visit museums much, truth be told, because they already live in them and can’t live without them. The art world might retrieve a useful lesson from the rubble.
He could be Moses looking down from a mountain top at a party below. All he sees is the party he hates. He misses whatever else extends to the horizon line. Personally, I’m not looking for Old Testament from an art critic.
At the same paper, Holland Cotter is (as usual), open, generous and perceptive, this time in a review of Younger than Jesus at the New Museum. Towards the end of his essay, however, he raised a question the New Museum would do well to ponder:
“Younger Than Jesus” …is, despite its promise of freshness, business as usual. Its strengths are individual and episodic, with too much work, particularly photography, making too little impact. But my point is that beyond quibbles about choices of individual works, (the show) raises the question of whether any mainstream museum show designed to be a running update exclusively on the work of young artists can rise above being a preapproved market survey. Removed from a larger generational context, can such a survey ever become a story, part of a larger history? (The same question applies to museum exhibitions that leave young artists out of the picture.) I’m asking. It’s a complicated subject. I don’t know the answer.
Cotter’s last graph is perfect closer for an review on the latest in dewy fresh faces:
A small commercial gallery called BLT, on the Bowery across from the New Museum, has announced that its May exhibition will consist exclusively of artists born before 1927. Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud and Ellsworth Kelly will be among the participants. The show will be called “Wiser Than God.”
I thought that Kimmelman’s most interesting point, on which he did not elucidate, is why Italians don’t visit their museums much. Italians aren’t surrounded by artworks — paintings and sculpture and drawings and prints aren’t outside — but by architecture in the cities that tourists visit. On my two visits to Italy, I have often wondered what it would be like to live in a centuries-old building that may not be altered: It seems to say to people: you are disposable, but the buildings are for the ages. In the United States, we take a different point of view, believing that every generation should make its mark. The tourist towns in the U.S. — for instance, Williamsburg, Virginia or Salem, Massachusetts — are where people play dress-up. Otherwise, they live modern lives in modern homes. However, Americans do visit their museums a lot, because these institutions work hard to encourage visits, through exhibitions, outreach programs to schools and a variety of amenities (cafes and parking, among others). The limited amount of governmental funding in the U.S. for museums requires these institutions to orient themselves to efforts that bring in people. In Italy, as I recall (and this goes back a ways), many museums were not open during business hours or only on certain days and had quite limited amenities; European institutions receive much higher subsidies from their local or federal governments, which relieved them of the need to solicit the good will of the public. It seemed to me that Kimmelman missed the point of his own experience: He was and remains a sort of Jamesian tourist, enchanted by the foreignness of Italy but not really understanding what makes him different than the natives.
Good call! There’s something ‘sweet and [almost] endearing’ about Michael Kimmelman’s romantic view of the Italians. It’s part of a long American tradition of feeling less cultured than Europeans. I love Henry James for many reasons, and that’s one of them. But it fails to explain how those sensitive and cultured people have managed to let go of so much of their treasury, have not adequately taken care of it, permit endless theft, and — most significantly — don’t feel any personal responsibility for supporting culture. I share Kimmelman’s view of the obscenities of a silly art market (happily in trouble, if not quite tanking). But to paint the entire visual art world (our museums, our artists, etc.) with that broad brush is to do it all a major disservice.
So even Kimmelman’s temperate expression of moral revulsion at the excesses of the contemporary art world can simply be brushed aside as “Old Testament”? Don’t be a party pooper, Michael? Everyone knows it’s all about having money and having fun, Michael? How dull of you to try to crash the party in your Moses costume when you’re not even on the guest list, Michael? Oh,wait, isn’t that Damien? Damien! Hi, remember me?
They are both good writers but ever since Michael moved to Europe, he is less interesting or somehow less essential. I am not sure if you’ve explained all of the reasons why, but it’s true that he feels less read. And Holland isn’t harping so much about prices at auction anyway.